Quill By Story Studio Beta Available Now—Tools, Gallery, and More!

At Oculus Story Studio, our mission is to pioneer by creating innovative content, to share by being open about everything we learn, and to spark growth in the VR filmmaking industry. With Quill beta, we’re sharing the amazing painting application behind Dear Angelica with the world. We’re excited that the tool launches today—simply set-up your new Oculus Touch controllers to enter the new world of illustrative VR!

Whether you need to quickly iterate on concept art or develop a sustained creative project from start to finish, Quill is an ideal tool for visual artists and storytellers. Thanks to the intuitive design of Quill and Touch, even people with little to no technical training can easily make beautiful work in VR. We’ve created a series of video tutorials to help you get started, and we plan to release more in the future.

Quill lets you sketch and paint on an infinitely scalable VR canvas with rich color tools and robust brush options. You can dynamically scale individual elements; zoom in to create detail and easily zoom out to check your overall proportions.

A variety of simple and powerful brush styles take advantage of the Touch controllers to give you fine control over your work, while a full suite of editing tools give you the flexibility to adjust saturation, weight, and more. You can also group, organize, and manipulate objects including brush strokes, image planes, and sound files using layers.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so we’ve built in rich, easy-to-use export features. You can take high-resolution screenshots (up to 8K) and easily create 360 photos, AVI videos, and animated GIFs to share your own work with the world.

We’re experimenting internally and working with comic book artists to explore the use of transitions between independent Quillustrations to weave together a cohesive story. Imagine moving seamlessly from one panel to the next in VR. This feature will be incorporated in a future release.

We firmly believe that content should drive the product. This expressive, precise tool clearly conveys your own style and aesthetic—from watercolor and pencil to oil painting, comics, and beyond. And because content is at the heart of all we do, we’ve created a dedicated VR gallery to share extraordinary Quillustrations (Quill illustrations).

The gallery will feature three amazing pieces at launch:

• Ric Carrasquillo’s First Tuesday lets you explore an entire museum filled with paintings and unique characters.
• Knight from Wesley Allsbrook takes you behind the scenes of Oculus Story Studio’s upcoming VR film, Dear Angelica.
• Koak’s Caravan places you in the middle of a surreal and haunting night-time environment.

We’ll continue to update the gallery with new Quillustrations, so be sure to visit regularly and explore new content.

An overview of Oculus Story Studio software stack

Quill will continue to evolve with the help of creators everywhere. We look forward to hearing about your experiences. Feel free to reach out to us at quill@oculusstorystudio.com.

Since Rift launch, we’ve seen VR grow as a completely new art form. Museums in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco including SFMOMA have hosted art shows dedicated to works created and designed to be experienced entirely in VR. A movement is building in the art community, and we’re thrilled to put Quill in the hands of artists and storytellers as they continue to create and innovate.

We look forward to seeing what you create!

— The Oculus Team